


and therefore one half of me

by softestpink



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Recovery, Sister-Sister Relationship, i'm here to cry a lot about sisterhood and cptsd!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 12:41:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16933443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestpink/pseuds/softestpink
Summary: “I’ll kill you one day, Gamora. Me and no one else.”Gamora rolls her eyes and crushes the projecter between her fingers. Nebula has always been overdramatic.





	and therefore one half of me

When Gamora is sixteen and Nebula is fifteen, their father leaves them on an outpost in a random world with fresh enhancements, one knife, one tin bottle, and enough first aid supplies to last only one of them for the following month and a half. Drez-Lar is a class four planet in the Large Magellanic Cloud with two moons and more ocean than land. Gamora only knows half of that information because Nebula tells her. Nebula is always telling her things. Always trying to prove how much smarter she is. Nebula tells her a bunch of other unasked-for facts that she tunes out because what matters most is what she already knows: 

 

Drez-Lar is an old Kree planet. The Kree hate her kind. 

 

At first, after Thanos leaves them in the eerie blue night, Gamora thinks they might squabble like they usually do. But Nebula doesn’t lunge for the bag or try to knock her unconscious the second their adoptive father disappears. Instead she straps the canteen to her back, hands Gamora the bag of first aid supplies, and starts up the hill they’ve been left on. The next three weeks are grueling and even though they snipe at each other cruelly and some nights one of them doesn’t get to eat, Gamora makes sure to avoid grievous injury in case Nebula is hurt. It’s only logical. She is Zen-Whoberian. Her skin is several times tougher than Nebula’s. Therefore, the first aid should be saved for her ally. 

 

After a week and a half, Nebula starts to hunt in excess. She can calculate the trajectories of the great sea worms better than Gamora can. Her new shoulder enhancements make her strikes faster. They need to store up food if they want stable meals. It’s only logical. She keeps most of the food for herself and gives Gamora the leaner meats. In their third week, Nebula dislocates her scapula in pursuit of a giant, tentacled fish. It’s obviously painful. The bone looks hideously out of place. She cries rough, angry tears but screams and bites at Gamora whenever she comes near. 

 

After nearly half of a day, Gamora has enough and marches over smooth rocks to where Nebula sits and snaps her shoulder back in place. The sound of it is sick and Nebula thrashes enough that it must be doubly painful. 

 

“Shut up!” Gamora snaps when Nebula gears up to yell at her. She’s exhausted and the cold winds are coming soon. They’ll barely have time to brace themselves in their makeshift rock shelter. “You’re injured. There’s no one else. You can hate me, but there’s no one else.” 

 

Nebula doesn’t yell anymore after that. Gamora spreads coolant from the bag over her shoulder. Probably more than she needs. She isn’t gentle because she’s sixteen and the daughter of Thanos and the thought doesn’t even occur. Gamora isn’t gentle, but she looks at Nebula’s shoulder that night and decides to hunt for the both of them for the next cycle of their time here. Logic tells her that if she were the crippled one, Nebula would let her starve if only to return to their father’s arms a victor. It’s stupid to feed her murderous sister. 

 

She does it anyway. 

 

Nebula is suspicious of her but smart enough to watch her mouth when Gamora is the one putting food in it. She is, if anything, a survivor. They have that in common. 

 

Gamora doesn’t just fish the way Nebula did. She removes her clothes and hangs them on large inland rocks to stay dry before she dives, naked and armed with one knife between her teeth. She cuts seaweed that stretches many, many feet into the deep. She treads shorewater and sifts through muddied dirt for clams. She takes the pack and hikes inland through the tiny forest, stealing eggs from giant, bioluminescent birds. Everything is so large on this world, and mostly blue, like the Kree themselves. When she comes back with variety in tow, Nebula scowls at her. Gamora knows she’s excited as well as annoyed that between the two of them Gamora’s proved herself the more capable of them at something yet again. 

 

Gamora doesn’t care. Her only concern is the two of them returning well-fed and unbroken by this world. Their survival hinges on success, in more ways than one. She has always exceeded Thanos’ expectations because the alternative is disappointment. So many of their father’s disappointments are dead now.  

 

Fires are hard to start on this world. Everything is so blitzing wet, sprayed in sea water. They mostly eat everything raw. It’s messy. They tear into their food like animals. Nebula heals quickly and Gamora is reluctantly impressed. They aren’t supposed to feel pride for each other, but secretly- deep inside, Gamora thinks she might. Thanos raises strong daughters. He says it to them often enough. Sometimes as a warning. Sometimes as high praise. It’s good to know he is right. Strong is how you survive.  

 

They sleep closely for warmth. The night winds are freezing, biting weather that Gamora has never had to deal with before, and Nebula has enhancements that malfunction if her core temperature is lowered too much. They have no choice. Sometimes Nebula kicks at her in her sleep. She always kicks back. It’s not comfortable, but it’s something Gamora can’t remember having since Zehoberei. Since her mother. She doesn’t like dreaming about her home planet but it happens sometimes and the memories make her retch into nearby bushes in the mornings. 

 

Nebula is smug when that happens. She manages sleeping better, Gamora knows, only because their father has literally pulled the memories of Xandar from her head. He uses them sometimes- to keep Nebula in line. Neither of them has it better or worse in Gamora’s opinion. 

 

They talk occasionally, about when the next storms will be, about food, about home, about the possibility of contact with Kree colonizers- maybe even pirates making pit stops for rest. Gamora tells her that’s stupid. Any pirate worth their salt would stop somewhere with decent supplies for the taking. Nebula says that remote areas are always ideal for those working under the radar of the law, idiot. And that if they come to Drez-Lar, she won’t hesitate to snap any pilot’s neck the second they touch down, broken shoulder or not. Gamora tells her that’s stupid too. 

 

“It’s smarter to wait. Watch them. Gather information.”

 

“Hiding like cowards? Father would take your arms for suggesting something so weak.”

 

“You’d know. He already took one of yours.” Gamora snaps, suddenly irritated. She hates being here. She hates Nebula, who is always yapping about how they are rivals when they both know Gamora could break her in half. She’s the stronger of them, something she’s proven time and time again. 

 

She decides to go for a hike in the wet woodland again, and as she walks away, Nebula throws a pebble at her back. Gamora’s fingers curl into fists and her skin tingles.

 

Bitch. 

 

The trees are not quiet. The swampland teems with life and birds call out endlessly but thankfully none of them do so in the voice of her _ irritating  _ sister. 

 

She wonders sometimes if- if the Culling hadn’t happened and her father hadn’t liberated her what she would be like. Would she be so hard? Would she be so strong? Gamora isn’t stupid. She knows all families are not like her family. She sees parents interact with their offspring on many planets. Sometimes, in her downtime, she takes her shuttle and visits Akkan- a planet that plays host to a race of pink humanoids with long tails and ears like twisted ropes. They are a peaceful people, with a social structure heavily invested in family from what she can tell. The murder of one’s own offspring is treason. She wonders if they are weak to value their young so much. She wonders if her own mother (who sang to her and braided her hair) was weak.

 

She finds a tall tree that she likes to sit by often because of the electric blue bark hidden underneath it’s dark moldy appearance. The leaves are big and droop enough that she feels hidden. Gamora climbs it as far as she dares, until the foliage blocks out her world and going any further would mean being tangled up forever. Her hair sticks when she leans back against the trunk. The fight with Nebula was fair, she thinks. It was _ fair _ . Father shouldn’t have taken her arm. Loss cannot always constitute failure. It- it should be a motivator, not a condemnation. No one has ever challenged Gamora the way Nebula did in that trial.  Her sister had nearly blinded her in the fight and still Thanos had wrenched her up and taken from her what Gamora had already broken. 

 

Her sister is not weak. Gamora turns in her seat on a branch toward the trunk and traces the blue, weathered lines of age. Her fingers follow a pattern that reminds her of braids. Someone’s- her aunt’s, she thinks. She can remember the face but not the name. Zen-Whoberian. Eyes like her mother’s. Long braids twisted together that curtailed her knees. She had been beautiful. She had been happy. She had been weak.

 

Gamora comes back to Nebula at night with bloody fists, skin scraped off and flaking between the knuckles. Blue tree bark sticks into the skin on the backs of her stinging hands and green blood dots her pants. Nebula doesn’t tease her about it. 

 

“He shouldn’t have taken your arm.” Gamora says stiffly. It means  _ I’m sorry I cannot lose to you. I am sorry we both have to be strong. I am sorry for us.  _ But because she’s Gamora and she’s sixteen and she can’t articulate that kind of sentiment yet, she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. 

 

“It only hurt in the beginning.” It means  _ It hurts still. I’m sorry too.  _

 

That night, Nebula is well enough to hunt for small crabs that burrow in the sands of the shore and when she returns, Gamora has cleaned both of their tops in creekwater. The clothes are laid out by the fire, not too close, but enough to be dried and warmed. They eat together and for the first time in their lives, they share the food equally. 

 

The next morning is a hard one, not because she wakes up retching, but because she can’t move her arms- can barely move her neck. Thankfully, Nebula is already up, turning her body so that Gamora doesn’t choke on her own vomit. It’s a kindness, though Gamora’s barely wakeful lizard-brain doesn’t rule out the chance that this is her doing all the same. It would do Nebula good to be rid of her only competition. She empties her stomach into the dirt and lays her cheek a few inches from the mess. 

 

“Focus on your breathing and listen.” Nebula tells her robotically, while kicking rocks and sand over Gamora’s mess. “It wasn’t our food that made you like this. The sap between your fingers last night was a paralytic. You let it into your wounds and I can’t drain them. You heal too quickly. It’s already in your veins.”

 

Gamora’s eyes dart to one of her hands. The skin is already closed up and smooth again. She groans.

 

“Don’t sulk. You’re too enhanced for this to be fatal.” Nebula tells her with a roll of her eyes. Gamora wants to kick her. Instead, she falls asleep again.

 

She wakes to the hum of Nebula doing self repairs. She’s still learning the many uses of her new arm, but the whirr of her nanites against metal is a sound that Gamora’s fallen asleep to on many nights. Her head is on Nebula’s thigh and her sister is turned toward the food roasting near them. 

 

The sky is alight, brilliant with stars. 

 

“You slept the entire day.” It’s an accusation of laziness and an admission of fear. Gamora never sleeps past a sunrise. 

 

As she tests her body, she finds that only her fingers and toes are functional. There is a testament to the effect of the tree’s toxicity if anything. Gamora’s accelerated healing is legendary. She will have to take a sample back home.     

 

“You didn’t kill me.” 

 

She can speak at least. 

 

“What’s the point in killing you when you aren’t at your best?” 

 

Nebula shoves her head into the dirt. Brat.

 

When Thanos retrieves them, Nebula is noticeably darker and Gamora is noticeably heavier- muscle picked up from the weeks of swimming and fighting and surviving. If he senses they are closer, he makes no mention of it. If he sees the way Gamora bares her teeth when any of his other ‘children’ pick a fight with Nebula, he ignores it. No good will come of them having an affection for each other. 

 

For Nebula to protest when their father sends Gamora for more enhancements- it’s a weakness. 

 

For Gamora to kill the Sakaarian son that challenges Nebula for the right of bearing a title as Thanos’ child- it’s a weakness.

 

She knows it’s true. _ ‘What will live, will fight to live’ _ , he tells them.  _ ‘If she perishes when you are gone, your own weakness will have killed her’ _ . 

 

Gamora remembers it every time they meet again. She remembers it when she is seventeen and he declares her the ‘favorite daughter’ with Nebula standing right beside her. She remembers it when she is twenty and Nebula crashes her mission to try and kill her in her bed. She remembers it every time she has the chance to eliminate her little sister and leaves her breathing instead. 

 

Gamora strips herself of all weaknesses- all but one.

 

The memory of Drez-Lar and the memory of their father’s warning- they clash like water and oil in her mind. She thinks it will all her life. 

 

She goes on like that, fighting internally with the choice, whenever her sister comes crashing back into her life. Once, when the team of galactic criminals she has joined is resting on Oriande, Gamora finds herself surrounded on an icy landscape in the remote hills. She left the others to sit in the frozen wastes and think, but predictably she’s been hunted down. She is ready to fight all of them, these burly Orianites that call for the head of the daughter of Thanos, when her reckless sister flies overhead and drops a bomb on all of them. 

 

Idiot.

 

Gamora’s collarbone is broken when she wakes, but she’s been dragged to safety. 

 

A message from her sister is strapped to her thigh, a small hologram recording playing on repeat.

 

“I’ll kill you one day, Gamora. Me and no one else.”

 

Gamora rolls her eyes and crushes the projecter between her fingers. Nebula has always been overdramatic. 

 

It is still complicated, even after she renounces their father and hunts him. Until they meet again on Ego and they’ve made a crater on the planet and they’re both gasping in the smoke and ruin. Nebula snaps that Gamora is the one that always  _ wanted  _ to win. All  _ she _ wanted was a sister. 

 

The idea makes her recoil. Gamora never wanted any of it. She never wanted to be the daughter of a murderer. She never wanted to live in the shadow of a monster and become one herself. She never wanted to win. 

 

Except... she did. Because there was something about it. Something about the approval and acceptance of the man she hated most in this world that made Gamora feel- righteous. Anointed. Perfect. Made her  _ feel _ . It’s an ugly truth, one that bites into her heart and makes her wish she still had the tree sap from Drez-Lar on hand. Of course. She had helped shape Nebula, even as Thanos shaped her.   

 

“You were all I had.” Gamora can’t look at her. “But you were the one who needed to win.” 

 

When they’ve defeated Ego and the team rests in safety again, Gamora doesn’t sleep. She lies awake in her quarters, barren but for the weapons and plants she’s decorated with. She lies awake and she thinks of how she wasn’t a sister to Nebula. She was a test. Always. It hurts her heart to know it, so she finds Nebula before they land on Xandar. She hugs her sister, something she is not especially good at, and she makes a promise then.

 

She will always protect Nebula. Even from their father. Especially from their father. 

**Author's Note:**

> "Why are you here for her? You have put yourself at great risk." 
> 
> "Because she is my sister, and therefore one half of me."


End file.
